Erno Kuusela wrote: > The refcounting vs generational GC reasoning I've heard argues that > refcounting is less cache-friendly: The cache line containing the > refcount field of the pointed-to objects is dirtied (or at least > loaded) every time something is done with the reference,
Has anyone actually measured this effect in a real system, or is it just theorising? If it's a real effect, would this be helped at all if the refcounts weren't stored with the objects, but kept all together in one block of memory? Or would that just make things worse? With dynamic languages becoming increasingly important these days, I wonder whether anyone has thought about what sort of cache or other memory architecture modifications might make things like refcounting more efficient. Ideally one would like a memory architecture that is wired in such a way that it just "knows" which objects are in use, without needing any explicit refcounting or garbage collection algorithms. Haven't figured out how to build such a thing at reasonable cost, though... -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
